


The Storm

by Missy



Category: Princess and the Frog (2009)
Genre: Coming of Age, Gen, Magic, Minor Character Death, Rebellion, Voodoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 12:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Antoine has a curiosity that Mama Odie’s teachings can’t satisfy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alasse_Irena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasse_Irena/gifts).



> Written for I Need My Fic in '13. Hope you enjoy, Alasse_Irena!

Antoine LeRoi had, by all and every meaning of the word, been born ambitious - ambitious, but quite lazy - or so his mother said. And Mother LeRoi knew everything - she was the one who had been a famous healer in their little shack town bordering the swamp for her whole entire life. Antoine could not recall a day when she wasn't off stirring up folk medicines to aid one person or another. As he grew in size, Antoine was able to gauge his mother’s abilities and compare them with the other witches; in the end he knew it to be true; his mother was utterly superhuman in her capacity to heal, console, and consort with the dead. The older Antoine became, the more he resented her preoccupation with voodoo, with healing and mysticism, and the more her envied and feared her powers. As he shivered his way through another winter, he wondered where her sense of duty ended and her loyalty to her family began.

As far back as he could remember, Antoine had dwelled around spellcasters. His mother would cup his hands around the thick heft of her wooden paddle and help him stir up the contents of her enormous iron kettle. She often sat him down among the elite and most important woman of their town; he had learned early to apply his lazy charm when they hovered around the door. Though his mother lavished the lions share of her attention on them, she often showed Antoine off to all and sundry, spit-shining his shoes and combing his hair into elegant curls. He would sit stiffly in their midst until he discovered that his natural charm was a useful tool, and used their sweet words to sucker candy from them. The easiest to con was an old crone who went by Mama Odie; she was almost too sweet, almost too kind. Antoine had always been able to detect the flaws and weaknesses of others; a tragic character defect to his mother but a useful one to Antoine. 

His childhood stretched out before him in endless lessons delivered by his mother. Soon he could revive a snail or turn a snake into a butterfly; these were simplistic forms of his mother’s magic, and he came to find them boring – it was more fun to enchant the broom into sweeping the floor or to bake up a fancy meal than to do any sort of good for the rest of the neighborhood; his mother had to force him into any friendship. His mother scolded him, yet advanced his training over time, allowing Antoine to gain a level of arrogant superiority that began to drive away the coterie of friends his mother had tried to develop for him over his lifetime. 

Then one day, just a few months after he’d turned ten, his mother took him on a long, perilous journey through the tall cypress trees to an old shack at the edge of the woods. There, he was left in the warm, herb-scented living room of Mama Odie, and the kindly old woman beckoned him toward her hearth before giving him broth and petting his head. His mind occupied, she then cordoned herself off with his mother in the back bedroom. Antoine paid little mind to their tempestuous argument; he was too fascinated with the beauty of Mama Odie’s hearth. Then the door opened, and his mother emerged, tear-stained and hands shaking.

“You have to stay with her to finish your lessons,” she gently explained.

“Oh.” He smiled sweetly and said, “if that’s what you want, Mama.”

And he turned back toward the fireplace, poking a stick into its spark-laden ashes.

***

He didn't really mourn when he was separated from his mother – he knew where she was, how to find her if he needed her, and she mattered so little to his daily existence. Mama Odie thought that was odd; shouldn’t he be at least a bit distressed? But an adolescent Antoine forgot all about his poor mother and became blindly preoccupied with the one thing his practical mother had never clung to – material goods. He’d horde what little money he collected doing chores for Odie and her neighbors and took it to the dime store, cobbling together money for a fine coat, enough cash to have his hair put in marcel waves.

Mama Odie drilled him in the various schools of thought; she taught him how to stir the stagnant swamps and how to run the currents of thick water through the reeds and rushes near the banks. Yet he persisted in sneaking knowledge, and his dip into the dark magics revealed too much of his selfish, incautious nature. Mama Odie shook her head at his mother's foolishness in letting him run wild; she put an immediate halt to his independent experimentation when he was fourteen. Then she tried to keep him satisfied with smaller spells - the self-tending of flowers, the bringing of sunlight on a cloudy day, or the occasional minor resurrection spell for wheat. She didn’t trust him with the knowledge of death and life yet and with the way he was going – as she was wont to repeat when he displeased her – she never would.

She knew nothing about the little lazarus trick he'd played with the snail, and Antoine wasn't about to tell her. And so there remained only one specific spell Mama Odie refused to teach him. It would allow him to meddle in the affairs of the desperate, she said, would give him a grave amount of power that he wasn't ready for yet. He was absolutely under no circumstances allowed to communicate with the shadow world, with the half-alive spirits which taunted the haunted. You have to stay clear of the mortals, she told him; you have to let them make their own destinies, unless it’s a matter of life and death. Selfish magic, she droned and preached, would be the death of them all. His learning went on in resentful secret.

One night he had enough confidence to try it. In secret, he crafted an amulet of clay dipped in a drop of blood culled from a sister's friend, then pasted it to the back of a moth.

He smiled as the winged insect turned into a beautifully curved goddess with a Louise Brooks bob.

*** 

The experiments became more creative as he grew bolder. He turned a shopkeeper who angrily refused him admittance due to unpaid debts into an ant, then squashed him under the heel of his spats. He conducted an orgy in the swamp, turning grape juice into champagne with a wave of his hand.

All of this Mama Odie could tolerate; all of this she could push away with a sigh and a shake of her head and an admonishment that he should do better. 

But all of that changed one stormy autumn night.

*** 

Her name was Eloise. She’d come to New Orleans following the military, only to be widowed by the war. The longer she spent taking jobs sewing and picking up after strange men, the more she yearned for a quiet, simple family of her own.

That was when Antoine stepped in.

They met at a juke joint, and after a few drinks her story tumbled out. His shrewd smile widened as he thought of the magic he might use upon her; perhaps the new ; he could make her an amulet, he said, and then crafted one of roses, cigarette ash and ambergris and hung it around her neck via a thread pulled from his elegant jacket. If she wore it for a week, he said, she’d find true love. And like clockwork, she found herself a handsome fellow right away while exiting the club – a fellow comprised of nothing but smoke and shadow, though Eloise only saw a flesh and blood man.

Antonine’s conjuring was indeed strong. But Eloise’s shadowy delusions were stronger. She followed her swain everywhere, and when he dissipated into a cloud of smoke she followed him gaily across the railing of a balcony and took a twelve-foot plunge to the pavement below. They had been married for just seven days.

 

*** 

Mama Odie knew. He would never find out how, but she learned that he. The entire town turned out for Eloise's funeral, sucked in by the abrupt tragedy of the death, and even in that teaming crowd Antoine could could feel Mama Odie's eyes piercing the back of his head. The following evening, Mama Odie confronted him with her anger, and then she and Antonie engaged in a battle the likes of which the Bayou has never nor will ever see again. Amber and rancid green lights dueled for supremacy in the sky as Antoine marshaled his powers and his new alliance with the shadow beings to claim the swamp’s soul permanently.

But he had not bargained on Mama Odie’s intelligence, her resilience. Though he could conjure darkness, she could conjure mother nature; she fought viciously with gouts of water and rushes of fire. Her magic was too quick for him. Ultimately, with a great blast of wind, Antoine was blown from the humble swamps of home and deposited into the center of New Orleans, head first. 

Awakening, he found his connection to the shadow world as strong as ever; but his powers were finite. He tried to swim back home but found his way barred; his boundless powers were blunted, and his body and soul were forever tied to the city; he could travel no further than New Orleans, only a few feet toward his old home before a powerful gust of wind and hail blew him backward.

The storm raged so and grew worse every time he made another attempt. Its strength had never been equaled on the bayou. Children wept and covered their ears, sliding under their beds to hide; mothers in flower-speckled Sunday best dresses fell to their knees to pray. The water boiled with foam and the crickets screeched like underwound violins.

The violence was strong enough to force him to give up and returned to New Orleans and conjured himself a new personality, a new image.

***

They’d call him the Shadow Man now – if you were his enemy. If you were his friend, he was Doctor Faciler, and he could conjure the most beautiful magic in the world if you asked him. They’d keep calling him by that until somebody brave enough had the courage to finally - finally- break the magic hold he held over the shadow world of New Orleans.

But that girl – that magical, marvelous girl, who was no conjurer but held determination untold at her fingertips – had barely been born. The city would be Faciler’s until then, the swamps Mother Odie's. And they would never meet again.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains characters that are the acknowledged and unlicensed property of **The Disney Corporation.** No monetary gain occured


End file.
